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Film
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In America
Despite Halle Berry and Denzel Washington’s celebrated 2002 Oscar wins, the career of Djimon Hounsou proves that the notion of Hollywood equality remains fleeting.
Saturday, November 29, 2003
By Brett Buckalew
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Those who consider this a relatively enlightened point in history for the cinematic repre~sentation of black people’s lives would do well to consider the troubling career trajectory of young, promising actor Djimon Hounsou.
Possessing a commanding, gentle-giant charisma and a piercing subtlety, Hounsou has nonetheless found himself trapped in a series of stereotypical roles, playing mystically wise, ridiculously noble martyrs who exist only to help white protagonists find spiritual peace.
He made his film debut six years ago, as a slave leader in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, where his calm, beatific gaze was somehow meant to give voice to a legacy of harsh injustice, and where his character’s freedom was valuable only insofar as it redeemed Matthew McConaughey’s two-bit lawyer. Since then, Hounsou has been seen onscreen dispensing sage advice to the likes of Russell Crowe (Gladiator) and Angelina Jolie (in this year’s Tomb Raider sequel), all without the benefit of being allowed to exhibit any recognizable human characteristics.
When he appeared last year in Shekhar Kapur’s underrated, Lean-esque desert epic The Four Feathers, the fact that his servant character—a Sudanese native who feels indebted to Heath Ledger’s hero—was garnished with a genuine sense of humor made the film feel bizarrely revolutionary.
Hounsou isn’t the central figure in director Jim Sheridan’s In America, which is hardly surprising, but he is one of the key reasons why the movie ultimately doesn’t work. Without the presence of the cardboard caricature played by Hounsou, In America would be merely a reasonably competent yet ruthlessly manipulative tearjerker; with that presence, though, the film acquires an uncomfortably racist dimension.
Allegedly inspired by Sheridan’s own experiences moving his family from Ireland to New York City, In America was even co-written by the filmmaker and his two, now-grown daughters, Naomi and Kirsten Sheridan. But Sheridan has gone on record as saying that Hounsou’s character is a “composite” of two people he met upon arriving in Hell’s Kitchen, and such “artistic license” is indicative of one of the film’s major flaws: at its core, it feels incongruously inauthentic, even insincere.
Sheridan’s stand-in within the narrative is Johnny (Paddy Considine), whose reasons for leaving Ireland with his wife, Sarah (Samantha Morton), and daughters Christy and Ariel (real-life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger, respectively), are neither political nor economic. Instead, Johnny is motivated by grief; he has lost his youngest child, Frankie, in a tragic accident, and he believes that a move to the United States will shake him out of his depressed stupor.
Sarah has already recovered emotionally from the loss, believing that further grieving would serve only to alienate Christy and Ariel. She is alarmed to discover that the New York air does little to alleviate Johnny’s pain, with his emotional absence as husband and father seeming only to increase.
Of course, we know that Johnny will eventually snap out of his self-loathing funk. What helps him along in the process are a few seismic narrative shifts, one of which involves the family’s new downstairs neighbor, Mateo (Hounsou), a reclusive painter who is first heard howling in despair.
Neither Sheridan nor the folks at Fox Searchlight would be too pleased if Mateo’s “secret” was leaked out in this review, so let’s just say that it’s plenty offensive. The character is so devoid of any shred of personality that he might as well be named Third-Act Catalyst.
Making matters worse is the inexplicable decision to depict Hounsou’s buffed-out masculinity as being inherently threatening. At different points in the story, the audience is misdirected into believing that Mateo is sexually preying on each of the four central family members (yes, that’s each and every one of them).
The distasteful implication is that, even when African-Americans turn out to be perfectly normal people, they sure can be scary before you get to know ‘em.
Sheridan has done excellent work before (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father), and the best that can be said about his newest is that, on the surface, it’s still quite entertaining. Individual scenes hum with unexpected tension, like when Johnny tries to win a prize E.T. doll for Christy and Ariel at a carnival game.
And, in the film’s most masterful passage, Sheridan gracefully cross-cuts between Johnny and Sarah’s intense lovemaking, and Mateo’s creation of a blood-crimson portrait (the thematic parallel becomes apparent later on).
But it’s when Sheridan aims for deeper emotional resonance that his movie clumsily falls apart. Johnny and Sarah feel only slightly more human than Mateo - they’re defined by little more than their grief - so once the narrative evolves into a precious, overly symmetrical fable of death and rebirth, the lack of characterization becomes severely detrimental.
Failing to give us a reason to care for these people, Sheridan just seems to be making a shameless raid on our tear ducts. Remarkably, though, his actors are capable of great emotional truth even in these shallow character depths.
| Considine is a real find, bringing genuine empathy to his portrayal of a man who has become a shell of his former self. The ever-impressive Morton is so passionately alive that she almost makes one forget that, on paper, Sarah is a silly icon of idealized motherhood.
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And then, once again, there’s Hounsou. As always, his twinkly-eyed gravity is theoretically effective, but it is wasted on a twisted hegemonic fantasy vision of the black man who suffers so that the white man can succeed. After watching In America, it’s tempting to walk out thinking, “Get this guy a lead role in a romantic comedy, stat!”
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